1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to managing flow control in a system with a plurality of requesters being serviced by a service provider.
2. Description of the Related Art
Flow control is the management of service request flow between requesters and servers in a computing environment to optimize throughput while minimizing resource utilization. When the service requests exceed the service processing capability, the system must control the inflow of requests in order to enable the server or servers to process the incoming requests. If the contention for services is not managed properly, lost data or wasted resources can occur due to the potential overflow of the system or the overhead of dealing with duplicate requests.
A variety of flow control mechanisms are known in the art, falling generally into the categories of dynamic control and static rate control. Dynamic flow control methods track congestion in real time, and regulate flow based on current congestion levels. Static rate control, on the other hand, uses pre-configured values, which are typically set by a management entity based on known capacities of the system.
Flow control is needed at many levels, from managing access to shared resources, such as memory inside a computer system, to managing distribution of information in distributed systems connected via a network.
It is in this context that embodiments of the invention arise.